REVIEWS
Album reviews
After achieving success with a solid debut album (Peaceful, The World Lays Me Down) and providing a soundtrack to the summer of 2008 in ‘Five Years Time’, Noah and The Whale...
Three albums into their career, and Arctic Monkeys are going along nicely, thank you. The frenzy that met their instant-classic debut would have been enough to derail most bands, but these...
The Great British Summer. In many peoples eyes it’s a total myth, nothing more than a reason to repeatedly complain between the months of June and September as everyone’s parade is...
One must always approach the quiet-then-loud market cautiously. It is not only a difficult market to survive in, let alone make money in, but it is an easy market to get lumped into as second rate...
When Pretty Girls Make Graves broke up, founding member and bass player Derek Fudesco formed The Cave Singers joined by vocalist Peter Quirk formly of Hint Hint and drummer Marty...
The indie- or modern-classical genre is flourishing. It’s been led in recent years by the prolific 12-string guitarist James Blackshaw, classical-drone connoisseurs Stars of the Lid, and the...
The voice is familiar, the layered guitars are familiar and the languid drum beat is familiar – separating Julian Plenti from Interpol may be more difficult than first suspected. The debut...
The Antlers’ heralded second album arrives with quite a bit of baggage: it’s a concept album charting a relationship with a woman who’s dying from cancer. It’s heady stuff...
This is the sort of music that depresses a certain percentage of people living in this writer’s home of Dublin, namely; those looking for Ireland to conjure up something both original and...
James Yorkston used to be in a punk band. Although if he has carried over any influences from his days as Huckleberry’s bassist he hides it well. Apparently harbouring no desire to return to...
Caught live
First Aid Kit have come a long way since their last visit to Dublin. That was almost three years ago, when the Swedish sibling duo ope...
"There is a freedom in violence that I don't understand / And like I've never felt before..."
The last time Merrill Garbus' ...
Onstage stands a young man, Telecaster in hand. His early-nineties grunge hair sweeps across his face, a stark contrast to the shimmering golden jacket he is wearing. This is...
As the tagline of Guy Maddin's 2007 'docu-fantasia' masterpiece, My Winnepeg, proclaims: "The truth is relative". This is the...
Sunday brings me (in no particular order) bowling, a roast, an emo-ta-tha-bone beach, basketball,...
Saturday at ATP tells me this: Minehead does not possess a single mobile phone shop, or anywhere that might repair your car after midday at weekends. It does, however, have a lot of charity shops,...
Just over a year ago, Little Dragon performed at Dublin's Crawdaddy to an audience of not much more than a dozen punters. This evening, by contrast, havin...
_0.jpg "Caught Live: Wild Beasts + BRAIDS @ O2 Shepherd's Bush Empire, London")
Well-read Northerners – and recent Lady Gaga remixers – ...
There has always been a sense of fragility attached to The Antlers, as if at any moment the band's material (and perhaps even the band members t...